Knit
Design Sketches
After having an understanding of who will be using our app, the next step in the process was giving our idea a low-fidelity representation. We now had a faint vision of what features could be included to be used in these different scenarios and allow Joanna and Lin to stay connected to their friends and family. After taking into account why and how our users will be interacting with our app, we created sketches to begin exploring ideas. It was important to not get too attached to any particular design or feature, as we would be continually adjusting and refining our design and that could potentially cause to overlook different solutions.
We first began with broad idea sketches on pages that would address the problems we articulated in each persona. Using whiteboards and markers, we came up with a several ideas to start our design process including a home page, contact profiles, favorites, and a calendar.
The team both individually and collaboratively produced pencil and digital sketches. We focused on what we believed to be the more important components of the app. These were the home page, the reminders page, and the profile page. We concluded that giving the user a colored bar as a visual representation of how long it had been since they last contacted an individual was an important feature in keeping users updated on their relationships easily and quickly. We refer to this bar as the "lifeline."
The profile page was designed with addressing the time zone and various social media outlet dilemas. The app would aggregate a contact's social media data and present it on their profile page. It would also give the user information on what time zone their friends were in to help time coordination, which we later expanded in after team discussion and peer feedback.
Creating the reminders page came from wanting to allow the user to make customizable notifications for a contact. The idea was that the user would see how long it has been since they've contacted one of their friends from the visual lifeline and be motivated to create a reminder to get in touch with them through one of the available mediums.
Once we had an idea of how Knit would look we then had to show how it could be used in different situations.